April 2011

April 30, 2011

1. In February, I met with P. Scott Cunningham and Pete Borrebach for lunch at a noodle house. I couldn't find the place at first because it was lodged in the lobby of a motel on Biscayne Boulevard that, in years past, was known more for hookers and guns and rock (and I don't mean 'and roll'). But this neighborhood has now reinvented itself --as is also the city of Miami's custom-- into a hamlet of galleries, eateries, and indie mom and pop shops. There are things to do here besides driving by with locked car doors. Scott and Pete were working on their own newborn - O, Miami, the city's first poetry festival.

I ate basil and tofu and listened to their schemes: they were going to try to place if only one poem into the hands of my hometown's 2.5 million citizens, regardless of whether they liked poetry or not. Scott and Pete were most interested in the latter, the possible converts, and they knew how to set the trap. They'd woo the city with a relentless courtship. O, Miami would wrap buses with couplets, fly in W.S. Merwin, the sitting U.S. poet laureate, invite Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, hip hop legend Kool Moe Dee, actor-now-writer James Franco, and many more to speak and read, host collaborative art shows and a literary death match, surreptitously sew poetry tags into shirts at thrift stores, drop poems from the sky, rent a Ferrari. They had a lot of wild ideas. Had they locked it all down yet? No. When would the festival launch? In about 6 weeks and running the whole month of April. I smiled and slurped my dripping and delicious noodles. I thought a) These guys are crazy. b) God, I hope they do it. All of it.

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England's green & pleasant Land

(from preface to Milton, a Poem)

(Whatever you think about today's wedding, this poem, set to music by Sir Hubert Parry, is a moving anthem. The crowds sang it as William and Catherine passed by in horse and carriage.Here's Todd Swift on the ceremony. -- sdh )

Yesterday I began a long post about how my Introduction to Poetry students read Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” very differently than I, finding within its waltzing trimeter a relationship between an abusive alcoholic father and a son whose love is pitiful, clinging.

I asked two poet friends with decades of teaching experience if they noticed a shift in the general classroom interpretation of this poem. Gray Jacobik replied that she too was surprised by a shift in the late 1990’s to an interpretation darker with family pathology. She suggested a possible source for this: “I trace this back to the whole era of “false memories” and implanted memories and to the endless daytime television programs, such as “Maury”, where personal human tragedies were often talked about.”

I think Gray is absolutely right. I remember well the tidal wave of t.v. programming on the subject of incest, sexual abuse of very young children by teachers, bizarre ritualistic abuse scenarios by cults, and finally, the fascination with the psychological aftermath of such abuse, namely multiple personalities. It strikes me that my own response to “My Papa’s Waltz”, once I heard the alcohol and abuse responses of my students, has shifted. I can no longer read this poem without also seeing these possibilities for interpretation. It’s like the Rubin’s vase illusion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_vase) , in which the mind “sees” one figure, either vase or face, and cannot see the other until it’s pointed out to them. After that, the illusion shifts back and forth between the two.

Bob Schieffer, who covered the Confederate surrender at Appomatox, says that Trump's demand for Obama to release his school transcripts is a racist insult!

What would Dick the Bruiser do?

Trump says, 'That’s a terrible statement for a newscaster to make! I am the last person that such a thing should be said about! Affirmative action is out there! It's a program that’s available! But I have no idea whether it applies in this case! I'm not suggesting anything!

April 28, 2011

I’m great fan of Theodore Roethke’s poems, particularly his villanelle, “The Waking” (beautifully performed by jazz singer Kurt Elling. (click here to listen to The Waking on You Tube.) Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is included in the textbook I use for my Introduction to Poetry course as a good example of stanzaic form. It’s one of the few poems using trimeter that I feel works very well. (And that’s a challenge. I’d love to hear suggestions that would cause me to change my mind.)

A few weeks ago, on one of the rare warm days we’ve had this spring, I read “My Papa’s Waltz” to my class, hoping to pull the gazes of the young men who sit by the window back into the classroom. I’d hoped this poem’s subject, about a boy and his father, would evoke some talk of the poem’s swaying, and even encourage a student to admit to dancing with his own father.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

But the response, even before I finished reading the poem, surprised me. Many of the students shifted in their seats, murmuring to each other. There were a few disgusted tsks.

Many years ago I attended a demonstration against the Vietnam War. There was a television crew from CBS filming the event, recognizable by the "eye" logo on the side of the cameras. I noticed that the network had hired motorcycle gang members as security guards. A bright idea! The Rolling Stones followed up on it a few years later at Altamont. On that day I felt like my eyes started to open to some realities of how things like government and media really worked. How cynical and brutal they were at the core. My eyes have opened and closed many times since then. But now, as Dr. King preached "I'm not worried about anything. I don't fear any man." And as the song says, "I was blind but now I see."

I see, for example, that professional wrestling -- especially as it existed in the early days of television -- is the best template for seeing what Donald Trump is doing, and also for understanding the spectrum of public responses to Trump. I want to say also that I fully support Trump and my only worry is that he'll "drop out." He has the power and the know how to really drive people crazy, just like 1950s villains such as "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers could do. There really is no other way to comprehend (and enjoy) Trump except as a old time pro wrestling bad guy!

Trump's baiting Obama about the birth certificate is a perfect example. Months ago Trump said that he would release his tax returns if Obama released his birth certificate. So now that Trump has succeeded in forcing Obama to release the certificate, one of Obama's flunkies (Gates) challenges Trump to do what he promised. But do you think Trump is going to go for that? What would Buddy Rogers have done? Yukon Eric? Dick the Bruiser? Needless to say, Trump doesn't even respond to Gates. Instead, he calls Gates "a loser" -- which of course he is compared to Trump. Why? Because Trump has more money! Because Trump has a sexy wife!

Oh, and does this make you angry? Does this make you feel like the furious pro wrestling crowd in Memphis felt when Andy Kaufman told them to "shut up or I'll sue you"? Trump can REALLY make the elites nuts and I say bring it on. This is the closest thing we will get to a real court jester.

And by the way, Obama is the ideal pro wrestling "good guy," the perfect target for Trump. And let's not forget: sometimes the good guy would turn into a bad guy, or be revealed as a bad guy all along. If it's done right -- and so far Trump has been a master -- there's really no telling how it will play out. But usually there would be a big showdown match that promised to resolve things once and for all. We'll see.

April 27, 2011

At first I felt a profound disappointment, and some anger, when I heard the reports that Bob Dylan had allowed Chinese authorities to censor his setlist for a recent concert in China. There would be no answers blowin’ in the Chinese wind. At a time when progressives in this country are leaderless and de-energized, when “the left” and “the far left” seem more like scare terms of the right than realities, Dylan’s seeming accession to the demands of the Chinese autocracy was even harder to understand and accept.

Particularly in light of the arrest and disappearance of the mesmerizing Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei, whose courage in the face of despotism is truly inspirational. If you have not been following the Ai Weiwei story, there is an abundance of discussion going on. My friend Michael Lally, for one, has been highlighting the case of Ai Weiwei on his blog Lally’s Alley.

Ai Weiwei was arrested by Chinese authorities on April 3rd, and has not been heard from since. News updates are readily available on-line (see, e.g., this piece). Frontline also offers an excellent short film delineating Ai Weiwei's life and career.

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd went after Dylan in the Times, only to be savaged herself by Sean Wilentz in The New Yorker.

By now, I had begun to feel the need for further reflection. One focus of mine was Dylan's attraction to the strange turn, especially in the last 10 or 12 years. Highlights include:

■His arrest in New Jersey in 2009 essentially for being an "an eccentric old man" wandering around with no i.d.and wearing two raincoats.

■ And my personal favorite—the video he did of "Must be Santa" to promote his 2009 Christmas in the Heart album.

Dylan is clearly playing by his own rules, and I find myself coming around to his side. Is there really a censor in China who could capably de-code Dylan’s performance to ensure his songs wouln't rock the rule of the authorities over there? I think not. I begin to suspect tricksterism. Dylan clearly feels no obligation to be a spokesperson for anything or anyone. He’s made that very clear for a long time. He doesn’t want anyone dictating his behavior as an artist. I find myself thinking that his alleged cave-in to Chinese regime is not worth taking seriously. He likes to confound. As does Ai Weiwei.

Whose father was a famous poet named Ai Qing (1910-1996), exiled during the Cultural Revolution and forced to clean toilets. “To live is to struggle,” he writes in this 1978 poem:

FossilWith such agility in your movements, Such buoyancy in your strength, You leaped in the foam And swam in the sea.

Unfortunately a volcano's eruption Or perhaps an earthquake Cost you your freedom And buried you in the silt.

After millions of years Members of a geological team Found you in a layer of rock And you still look alive.

But you are now silent, Without even sight. Your scales and fins are whole But you cannot move.

So absolutely motionless, You have no reaction to the world. You cannot see the water or the sky, You cannot hear the sound of the waves.

Gazing at this fossil, Even a fool can learn a lot: Without movement There is no life.

To live is to struggle And advance in the struggle; Even if death is inevitable. We should use our energy to the fullest.

Hi. I can’t believe I am back here in the twenty-first century writing to you guys. I’ve thought of you a skillion times over the decades and I am laterally shivering to be back here at my desk in Old Brooklyn keyboarding you.

21st Century-Jennifer is up at Harvard giving a talk. I’m visiting from 2111, where my students have convinced me to do a Timeback100 with you guys.

In 2088 the Portuguese Michigans came out with a time visiting machine that allowed the visited time to see the visitors, with the visited time forgetting the whole experience days later and time proceeding unchanged. The 3001 model allowed some remembering and reality changed, we lost some good people, and the whole thing was outlawed.

My Steg student had access to one and is so enraged by this chapter in his textra book that he brought it in and since I have one of the last original poetic licenses, I decided to do it and risk radical dislocation and possible disappearance. I mean, what are the odds that we’d have both the machine and the license and an idea worth trying? And what are the odds we’ll disappear?

This was my Steg student’s idea and I’m trusting it, but of course he didn’t tell me exactly how to say it. So it is tough, but here goes.

For ten years after President Obama, the first, shows the birth certificate the thing is sort of a nonevent, it helps him win his second term and then is forgotten. Then starting in 2024 the Papers movement actually starts around a similar issue with President Green but takes all its images and really its energy around this incident in 2011 with Obama’s papers being shown.

If there is any explanation for what happened in the 30s, it begins here, with this act, with the meaning and humiliation and rebellion of what became both the Show Me Your Papers movement, and Papers Please. And in all fairness it also started the Cage Age Rage Page Events which has been the source of everything wonderful about the second half of the 21st and this first ten years of 2100.

But my Steg says the 2030s and their aftermath is to be avoided if possible and we are going to try. I’m going to start with an excerpt from the textra book.

The history of Papers Federal must begin in 2011, ten years after First Bombing and ten years before the Great Landing – two things which are often forgotten and must not be. The country was still thinking in terms of skin color (black, white, brown) and categories like asian, african american, hispanic, and jew. Some early subclubs and Rebrownings included Old Brooklyn, whole areas of Prequake California, and many of the unfederated universities that dotted the country until the 2050s.

This was also when the money corporations were at their zenith, just before the seeds of their collapse are sown in the Landing, and some of these money corporations also resembled the subclubs that would eventually become Blend Times and the whole Darker phenomenon. Still, in most food halls, whole sections of diners would clump up according to self-identified categories of the type described above. Even in the most mixed communities, photographs clearly show that in restaurants most tables were taken by a single one of these categories, though age and gender was as often mixed as not.

Then on April 27, 2011 sitting first-term President Obama the Father made public his Papers (then called birth certificate, which is where the term Birthers comes from).

This gesture was the catalyst that changed the world. Historians have argued over the real significance of the publication of the Papers, but there is no way to deny that this is the moment that people stopped accepting the racism and individualism of the previous century.

Well, I’m not sure how much good quoting the textra is going to do. Let me try to put it in terms that make sense to us, where I come from, in my time. Here goes. Before the Landing, humans had for a few centuries been festering in a bad feedback loop of outsiderism based on age, skin shade, tits or pricks, and the various cults, even still some ultra prims like gods born of virgins.

New York, NY: April 15, 2011 – Once upon a time, right here in New York City, storied clubs – swanky hotel supper clubs, zebra-striped celebrity showcases, smoky after-hour boîtes – ruled the night. Places like The Stork Club, Copacabana, Persian Room and Latin Quarter (run by Lou Walters, father of Barbara ) were meccas where songwriters, singers and society mingled and fueled American popular music. Author and Lyrics & Lyricists™ series artistic director Deborah Grace Winer takes the helm as artistic director/writer/host for The Crowd’s at El Morocco: The Heyday of the New York Nightclubs, on April 30 and May 1, 2. Joining her are vocalists Debby Boone, La Tanya Hall, James Naughton, Billy Stritch and Karen Ziemba.

April 26, 2011

Why do people gamble? "I think it's a biological necessity for certain types," said James J. Carrolll, so called "betting commissioner" of St Louis, who laid the odds for the Kentucky Derby and the World Series. "I think it is the quality that gives substance to their daydreams."

Quoted by the late Daniel Bell (1919-2011), in "Crime as an American Way of Life," originally in Antioch Review, Sumer 1953, reprinted inthe Spring 2011 issue of the magazine.

A few weeks ago, I ran a writing workshop at the James Merrill House with novelist and current Merrill writer-in-residence Jedidiah Berry (The Manual of Detection) and my husband Bill, a boat builder well-known for restoring old wooden boats. The topic was “New England and the Sea”, which I thought would be just the thing for a workshop with 180 degree views of the Atlantic from the third floor of Merrill’s apartment in the village of Stonington, CT. Jed offered to do a close read of the first pages of Moby-Dick, Bill gathered together some beautiful drawings of boats such as the Amistad and Nathaniel Herreshoff’s personal yacht.

I thought my part would be easy: I’d find a few poems by Merrill about the harbor, sailing races and fishing fleet, maybe a poem mentioning New England’s enduring and sometimes tragic reliance on the sea. I paged through Merrill’s CollectedPoems, but found scant mention of the water, boats, even swimming. I did find a wonderful description of the dining room of his home in Stonington, with its cupola painted a brazen tangerine, and the white marble dining room table where he and David Jackson sat hunched over their Ouija board, speaking with spirits.

April 25, 2011

Like many American poets, I teach literature and creative writing at a university part time. This semester, along with a poetry writing course, I’ve been teaching Introduction to Poetry to thirty undergraduates, most of whom are in my class to fulfill general education requirements. I’ve got undeclared sophomores, junior physics majors, education and criminology majors, and pre-meds and even a couple of students who might want to take more English courses. Part of the Connecticut State University system, my classes are mostly made of students from Connecticut, but contrary to the image of Nutmeggers as rich, white, and spoiled, my students are as diverse as students in any college classroom in the U.S. And what moves me the most is that many of them are the first in their families to get a college degree. These students hold down fulltime jobs, raise children, care for extended families and have recently returned from serving the country in the Armed Forces. Many commute often an hour or more to get to class.

It became clear to me very quickly that I’d have one shot to pull them into that well of poetry that I leapt into years ago, one chance to be upended and surprised by what beautifully-arranged language can do to a person. So I went the way of the ancients: I had them commit a poem to memory, to carry it in their bellies, to say it, loudly, proudly, and standing.

Okay, I can't take credit for finding this - thanks to Don Share for posting it first. From the 1958 teenybopper drama, High School Confidential! Recognize the guy playing the piano? Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester). And the hep cat smoking at the table with the square chick is John Drew Barrymore - John Barrymore's son and Drew Barrymore's father.

(Oh, and the reason I can't be a beatnik? I don't own a pointy bra, Daddy-O.)

(David encouraged me to read Gerrit Henry's The Time of the Night. I wish I had discovered this poem in time to post yesterday, but it is still worth reading. The book is everything David says it is, and more. Buy it! -- SDH)

The Light of the World

If somebody asked meWho my main influencesHad been . . . but whoWould want to knowA hard thing like that?I ran around to three galleries Today. I couldn't fine hot crossBuns in any of four groceries.Tonight I walked out onEaster Vigil at St. Ignatius.Broadway this weekend eveWas alive! Not just with creaturesOf the night, like me, but liliesLanguishing in their stalls,Loud children's cries, dogs leashed

Senselessly to parking meters,Yuppies, winos, bums. I missed Mass,And the Eucharist. But I gotThe Times early. Why do Such pomp and ceremonyHave to crowd out So simple, so great a memory?It's too late now.Time to write a niceImportant poem, and this,Guys, is it. Easter gladness.

April 24, 2011

Rarely reliable are the blurbs on the back of a book. Gerrit Henry's posthumous Time of the Night (Groundwater Press) is the exception that proves that this poet rules. I know, I know; I couldn't resist.

Reading Henry's poems, John Yau is put in mind of "a roller coaster ride through hell (or is it Manhattan?), if only to see what illusions of bliss and tatters of happiness remain to be had."

Eileen Myles sees the "glitzy ease, high art, smart remarks and chattiness" associated with the New York school but observes that "there's so much else," lists some of the contradictory impulses to be found in his work, and concludes that The Time of the Night " is "a whole collection of poems written by Hamlet" -- a magnificent statement, though Henry is as likely to identify himself with Ophelia as with Hamlet: I quote from his poem "Ophelia": "The moon / beams down on me, has the face / of Hamlet, his dark body invisible, / but is not he, has not even read the play, / and lifts me warm and fesh / into a second life where I dance / with him in a field of flowers / whose names / I cannot remember."

Carter Ratcliff, the third blurbist, characterizes Henry's lines as "down-to-earth speech haunted by heavenly song. Thus he evokes the small pleasures and great terrors of a life haunted by heartbreaking intuitions of the ideal."

None of this is blurbery. This is first-rate critical analysis.

Animated by the spirit of romance, Gerrit Henry's poems chronicle the quest for happiness that is an American's birthright. Like the composers of the show tunes he loves, he mixes sadness and gaiety, self-deprecatory humor and tears at midnight, He has a gift for rhyme. "To entertain, and to console: / These are my only goal. / And, surely, to make myself sigh. / And, maybe, to make your time fly." Some of his rhymes aspire to be "suaver than Cary Grant" -- and worthy of a sobriquet for John Keats: "I want it understood: / The good we do is not just done for good, / But for all time, all perpetuity. / Doves would cry, you wrote so easily."

In addition to the aforementioned, Gerrit loves Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Mahler; the dancers of Degas; the voices of Judy Garland and Dinah Shore, and the dancing feet of Adele Astaire (Fred's sister and orignal partner). Henry exhibits a connoisseur's taste and knowledge, so you can learn a lot from his poems. His wit reminds me that he once likened himself to "Cole Porter's son." Consider the opening of "My Affairs," one of his list poems:

There is plenty here to make you smile. But there is also a rich quality of pathos that shows us just how good a poet we lost when Henry died in 2003, aged 53. I think of him today in part because of his poem "The Easter Story," which begins "Easter is an animally lonely day."

Oh, I almost forgot. Alex Katz's rendering of Gerrit -- a detail from a 1977 group portrait -- graces the cover making this as attractively produced as any book of poems I have seen in years.. -- DL

The first of these anecdotes comes courtesy of Paul Auster. "Paul Violi told me the funniest story I've ever heard about somebody's childhood," Auster told me. Apparently Paul [Violi] didn't speak until he was three, going on four years old. No one had ever heard him say a word. Finally his mother got worried enough to take him to the doctor. "He hasn't learned to talk," she said. The doctor chided her. This is very serious. The boy could be in real trouble. Shame on you for waiting so long before taking him to me. At which moment Paul uttered his very first words: "What are you, some kind of a jerk?”

Paul and I used to teach our poetry writing classes on the same night, Tuesday night, with our classes ending at the same time, 10:30 PM. Afterward we would meet at the Cafe Loup on West 13th Street, where a lot of our students, former students, friends and colleagues would also congregate. We used to drink. . .seltzer. A lot of . . .seltzer. And then he drove back to Putnam County. I didn’t even realize until yesterday, when we drove up the Taconic to Peekskill Hollow Road, where we attended a memorial service for Paul, that this was a fifty-mile journey. I just had to walk a few blocks to get home. Paul had to take the Henry Hudson to the Saw Mill River to the Taconic in the dark. Well, at least there as no traffic.

I remember once chatting with a friend at the bar, Matthew Yeager, who suddenly bade me turn around. Here is how Matthew recollected the incident in an e-mail:<<<I have been thinking about Paul a lot. In my final image of him, he is at the center of a throng of worshipful students at Cafe Loup, all of whom happened to be female. Do you remember that night? We were talking to each other, on stools. Ten feet away, Paul Violi looked like a painting of Plato in his prime, if Plato had taught women. He was glowing like a champion woman's basketball coach (whose team of also happened to be inexplicably good looking).... It is sad that he is gone.>>>

-- DL

(Ed note: If you have an anecdote about Paul, please post it here. sdh)

Two Sunday mornings ago, one of the last Sundays in the long Lenten season that prepares Christians for the promise of Easter, the reading from the New Testament in my church, St. Bartholomew’s, in Manhattan, was the passage from the Book of John in which a man born blind is given sight by an itinerant prophet named Jesus. When the man describes that experience he is rebuked by the Pharisees and other sticklers for correct procedure. Hounded for a proper explanation, he finally says: “One thing I do know: though I was blind, now I see.”